Epidermal Growth Factor-like 7 As a Novel Therapeutic Target in Mantle Cell Lymphoma

▪ Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is an aggressive form of mature B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), accounting for nearly 6% of NHL cases. Currently, MCL patients are treated with aggressive chemo-immunotherapy regimens followed mostly by consolidation with autologous stem cell transplantation and maintenance rituximab. Despite these intensive therapies, MCL prognosis remains poor, with a median overall survival of 6-7 years, with most of the patients developing the refractory or recurrent disease. Thus, there is a need for novel and more effective, less toxic therapies for MCL. Epidermal growth factor-like 7 (EGFL7) is a protein secreted by endothelial cells and plays a critical role in angiogenesis. Our lab was the first to demonstrate a role for EGFL7 in hematologic malignancies, demonstrating that EGFL7 is increased in leukemic blasts of AML patients and that anti-EGFL7 treatment alone results in prolonged survival of leukemic mice (Papaioannou et al., 2017). While EGFL7 has been shown to play a role in some hematological malignancies, its role in MCL has not been investigated. Therefore, we assessed EGFL7 expression levels in MCL patients compared to healthy controls using the publicly available dataset GSE46846. We found significant increases in EGFL7 in malignant B cells from MCL patients compared to healthy individuals (p